When the product first came out, I was enthusiast and even wrote an article about it. At the time, we were told that 1.X customers would have a lifetime free upgrade. A year or so later, the boys running things decided this was not good for them so they reneged which soured my impression a great deal. I like the product, the people behind it, not so much.

When the product first came out, I was enthusiast and even wrote an article about it. At the time, we were told that 1.X customers would have a lifetime free upgrade. A year or so later, the boys running things decided this was not good for them so they reneged which soured my impression a great deal. I like the product, the people behind it, not so much.

Now that it's open source my understanding is that the only original developer involved in the resurrection is Anton Kast so you may wish to give it another look. You'll get your free lifetime upgrades at any rate:-)

When the product first came out, I was enthusiast and even wrote an article about it. At the time, we were told that 1.X customers would have a lifetime free upgrade. A year or so later, the boys running things decided this was not good for them so they reneged which soured my impression a great deal.

Hah! Many, many years ago I purchased Paintshop Pro from JASC Software - with a lifetime upgrade. Then it got sold to Corel - you know the rest..

I also am a little irritated with the original team because at the time I came across Lightzone I was running a Win2000 machine and their then latest version required at least WinXP. I asked to purchase a license for the previous version but they declined..... Granted Lightzone doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Lightroom, it still has some interesting features and seems to be a capable product which I quite like!

Interesting to see this coming back. I too liked it, generally, when it first came out. There were some quirks, particularly with printing. The user forum was quite active but vendor support wasn't great.

If I recall, there were some internal problems with some of the original group leaving the company. The change in management may have been the impetus behind the change in pricing structure.

I still use LightZone 3 for certain types of editing. I don't use it for raw conversion, and it could never replace Photoshop for me. But the tone-mapper and relight tools are very useful for tonal adjustments, especially when combined with different blend modes. The big downside with LightZone is performance. Even on the latest machines it performs pretty badly, and is only capable of using about 1.5GB of RAM. The bigger your image file the worse things get; in fact past about 100mp it just won't work which makes it unsuitable for working on stitched panos. So if performance can be improved in the open-source project that would be great.

Hah! Many, many years ago I purchased Paintshop Pro from JASC Software - with a lifetime upgrade. Then it got sold to Corel - you know the rest.. I also am a little irritated with the original team because at the time I came across Lightzone I was running a Win2000 machine and their then latest version required at least WinXP. I asked to purchase a license for the previous version but they declined..... Granted Lightzone doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Lightroom, it still has some interesting features and seems to be a capable product which I quite like!

You know, life time can be short. Who's lifetime by the way, yours or your vendors?

Doesn't matter. We early adopters were given a promise that the company reneged upon. They lied. So in my book, they can piss off.

But to answer your question, and how it doesn't matter:

If my life ends, then I can assure you the day after I die, I will have no need to upgrade to the next promised version for free. If they die, then presumably the effect could result in the company going out of business and I'm not going to get the next upgrade anyway.

The Lightzone boys made a promise they quickly revoked. While both I and them were alive. It says a lot about their behavior!